Copyrighting the English language | Hacker News Reader

Copyrighting the English language

fhtr.blogspot.com

23 pointsmadboy14 comments

Also, copyright, unlike patents REQUIRES copying. A patent can infringe accidentally, even if you didn't know the patent existed. With Copyright you must have actually copied from a copyrighted work for your work to be infringing.

Is comparing the same as copying? Would it be copying if someone tells me whether something I make is the same as their copy or not?

Haiku poems have been held to be copyrightable; at 17 syllables, they may be 11 words, or less.

Someone should do a search of all haiku poems then and check to see which ones coincidentially match up with 11 words that were written before the poems release.

Personally I think if you want to copyright something you should keep it to yourself. Don't poison the pool with the content that you own in order to extract royalties from the rest of us. It's bound to leak through sooner or later.

Let the criterium be that if you perform something in public or spread it it becomes public domain instantly.

This will upset lots of apple carts but I really think it is the only thing that in the long term will make sense.

Gah, the internet ate my thoughtful response: PD doesn't protect your right to be named as author, IMO that moral right should be protected as it is in the Berne Convention.

Copyright [supposedly] ensures that works move into the public domain. The problem with copyright is that the terms should be of the order of 15 years, not life + 70.

Without copyright books would simply not be edited - editorial staff couldn't be paid as on release an opposing publisher (lulu?) would simply grab the book and publish an identical but lower cost copy. The first copy sold would have to assume the costs of the entire production, authors, publishing staff, printers, machinery.

Bands would probably still fill venues. But songwriters would be working for free as they could never demo a piece without "spread[ing] it".

DRM and contract law would fill the void and IMO less pieces would ever eventually enter the public domain and the arts would no longer provide most of the careers it does now.

A painter may still sell pictures, but a photographer could only sell each one once. Any advertiser could use your personal picture if you published it online. Anybody could claim your programming library, not only for free, but as their own if they could access the code in any way.

Precious few of your examples would seem to me to be a 'loss' of something, most of them would simply change the theater we're operating in.

Copyright is not all bad, but that is not the issue here. The issue is whether the sum total of the effect of the existence of copyright is a good thing or a bad thing.

My suspicion is that it is a net negative.

Given how finite phonemes are, couldn't one make a massive table of english syllables and then generate all their possible permutations? then copyright remove-if #'already-patented-p generated-sequence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English gives as an example the one word haiku 'tundra'.

But in doing so, you will violate so many copyrights that you'll forget about all the new ones you acquired.

You are not violating copyrights, because you are not copying other works. However, as nobody would read that text, you can't really enforce copyright because they did not derive their work from yours.

But, if you've published that work once, eg on the internet then you can re-publish the same work when another party comes up with their own version (AFAICT). So when AP publish their equivalent of your prior published phrase you simply re-publish that identical excerpt - you've haven't copied from them you've simply taken a timing queue.

You need a good date on your copy, I believe you are still allowed to register a work with the US government, so that would do, or get someone like archive.org to take a copy for you.

What could AP do?

You might also try for prominent publication of your word lists so that you can argue that AP copied you based on them having the opportunity, but I don't think you'd swing that one by a long shot.

This is absolutely not legal advice by any stretch of the imagination!

How do you define "publish on the Internet" when it's terabytes and terabytes of data? Just buy a domain and host the files from home for a minute, and technically you've "published it on the Internet."

What I'm saying is, to register a work with the US government, you'd have to filter out all the already-copyrighted 11 word combinations, which would be virtually impossible. Without a distinction made between the already-copyrighted sentences and your "original" ones, I don't think you could have a copyright on the original ones.

No, you're not copying those short phrases from anyone else, you wouldn't need to filter them out. This is establishing a point for yourself where any 5 word phrase from now on can be published by you relying on your own publication as a prior source.

If your generation of the new phrases is considered to be a purposeful act that you performed in order to obtain the copyrights for them, then the generation of existing copyrighted phrases would also be a purposeful act, and hence would be copyright infringement.

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